The Emperor Tea Garden (Middle East Literature in Translation)

In Eray’s world of fantasy and fun, there are few boundaries between reality and imagination. There is a roadside tea garden where spirits gather by night to carry on flirtations until they fade into the dawn, and there is a tavern in Bartin where men make their lost illusions of love come alive by thinking of them. The narrator exchanges places with Night for twenty-four hours to find out what it means to be the unsleeping night, the guardian of dreams. The slot machines in a casino provide love advice and clues to the multiple realities of romance, history, and everyday life. In these enchanted spaces, Eray investigates the concepts of love, passion, and loyalty, taking readers on a journey that transcends time, place, and narrative conventions. A mixture of drama and fable, confession and memoir, the fabulous and the prosaic, The Emperor Tea Garden is a place where you have never been and always are. Turn the page in Eray’s work and you are in a different world, sometimes several at the same time. You may never come back.